Strange that we have made it to a new month. I guess time really flies in an election year with a pandemic, social unrest, and for my community, a derecho. Meanwhile, I am finishing up my assessment of the International Olympic Committee’s Athlete365 portal, which I can say after a thorough investigation into the content is not a carbon copy of Life After the Games. The Life After Sport and Preparing for Future Success courses I accessed are just brief components of the larger Athlete365 system. Again, I think of it as a sports version of LinkedIn Learning, though Athlete365 participants can gain access to that as well thanks to a partnership with Intel.
Allow me to share some of the curricula that can be found on Athlete365. There are a couple of courses about public relations, conditioning, coaching, organizing fundraising events, and a very prominent issue in the Olympics–cheating, specifically discouraging athletes from partaking in activities that compromise the fair play aspect of sports. The IOC also has a document similar to what we call the LAG Playbook, the interactive piece that students would fill out to learn more about themselves. Theirs is a life skills booklet, however, it lacks the interactivity of our document. Most importantly, Athlete365 is intended for athlete development in general rather than focusing on a specific subset of that development like the ICC is. The IOC even suggests that athletes reach out to a career counselor for further assistance, which is what we can offer them.